Indian Spirit
One of my hobbiesis Civil War reenacting. I have been doing this on and off sinceI was about 14 years old. Back in my late-teens, I am now in mymid-twenties, when I used to have more time to devote to thissort of thing I used to do other kinds of reenacting as well.Since the weapons and the uniforms were so cheap my buddies and Iwould occasionally go out and do WWII reenacting with the localAmerican outfit (yes there are people who do this). It is on oneof these WWII reenacting outings that I had the strangeexperience which I am relating.
It was a fairly casual outing. There was no organized event butthe family of one of the guys in one of the British outfits whowe were friends with had a farm in the Shenandoah valley. We alldecided to go there and wander around the woods all day shootingat each other and playing out little tactical situations. As itended up only about 10 of us showed up, none of whom were Germans.So we basically just spent the whole day playing a sort ofmodified paint ball game on this guy's property. We were allplanning on crashing out in the farmhouse at the end of the day.
The farm that this guy's family owned was a very old piece ofproperty located very far out in the countryside of centralVirginia. The house itself had four or five different sections,each of which was very distinctively constructed according to thearchitechtural tastes of its respective period of Americanhistory. The oldest part of the house was a log cabin datingapproximately to the 1740's. Several additions separated it andthe newest part of the house, a quasi-Victorian addition datingto the 1920's. It was rumored that the first white baby born westof the Appalachian mountains was born in the log cabin. Whetheror not that was true that section of the house was very old.
My friend's family had owned the farm and house for roughly tenyears before we were there on that Summer evening and, accordingto him, it was haunted. His family had always used the propertyas a kind of weekend retreat, mostly in the summer. He relatedhow they first became aware that the house was haunted when theyarrived one early Spring day to do some cleaning and prepare thehouse for use during the upcoming Summer. When they walked inthey heard a set of footsteps on the topmost floor, the attic,which sounded like someone walking to the windown to see who itwas who had just arrived. They assumed that there was an intruderin the house, left immediately, and then called the police. Thepolice were unable to find anyone or any evidence that anyone hadbroken into or even been in the house since the previous Summer.This happened on one or two more occasions and then the familyfinally talked to some local people familiar with the house whotold them that it had a history of such strange activity and wasrumored haunted, although nothing really serious had ever beenknown to happen. Since then it was not considered abnormal tohear strange noises in the night or footsteps walking around inthe attic. The activity always seemed centered around the atticof the main part of the house and the back stairway, both areasdating from the late-19th centuries. The family considered theghost, or whatever it was, to be just another part of thelandscape of the farm and never really gave it too much attention.
I learned all of this over the course of a long evening'sconversation with my host after we stopped our wargames. We wereall sitting around just talking and enjoying the warm, summerevening in the countryside.
We went to bed that night around midnight. My own sleepingquarters were in the old log cabin section of the house, which Ishared with one other person. He got the couch so I ended upsleeping on the hard, plank floor which ended up being morecomfortable than it would seem. Sometime in the middle of thenight something banged into my head. Actually it felt like theplank on which my head was resting had been banged up frombeneath. I remember sitting up groggily and thinking about how myfriend had also told me that there was about three feet ofclearance under the floor of the cabin and how he used to playunder there as a child. I figured that it was just our hosttrying to frighten the two of us sleeping in that section of thehouse after telling us about the house's ghost all night. I hadno trouble getting back to sleep.
For some reason I woke again around 6 AM. I know the time becausether was a clock in the cabin and I remember looking at it. Ialso remember the growing light of dawn casting a sort of half-lightthroughout the cabin. What I saw then didn't startle me. I don'tknow why it didn't startle me but it seemed perfectly natural tome at the time. Perhaps the reason for that is that I was onlyhalf awake or perhaps the story that I am relating to you here isdream rather than reality. If it was a dream then it was one ofthe most realistic dreams I have ever had. All of the details ofthe cabin were present in my dream as they were in reality, rightdown to my friend asleep and snoring on the couch. What I sawthen was an Indian sitting in one of the cabin's armchairslooking down at me. He was wiry and of medium height and worewhat looked like dearskin pants with a loincloth over them and adirty white or gray shirt covered his torso. His hair was blackand greasy, his face looked weather beaten and he was wearingsilver hoop earrings and what looked like strings of glass beadsaround his neck. He didn't look like any kind of apparition, helooked like a man sitting in a chair staring at me.
Like I said his presence didn't startle me but I remember sittingthere for a moment looking at him and wondering in a totally nonalarmed way who he was. The next thing I did was to ask him. Whowas he? Why was he there? His answer came in the form of a storyand when I think back to it I can hear none of his words. Insteadof the memory of his words in my mind I have what could beconsidered a kind of film of the story that he told.
I see him walking down from the hills with a load of furs whichhe wanted to trade with the white settlers. I see him sittingbeside a fire outside of the log cabin with the owner of thecabin bargaining. As part of his bargaining the owner of thecabin was plying the indian with mug after mug of hard cider. Ithen see the owner of the cabin trying to take the furs andgetting into a fight with the indian. Then I see the owner of thecabin stabbing the indian to death and taking the furs forhimself.
The next thing I remember is waking up with the rest of mybuddies. It was raining so we decided to call the day's wargamesoff. As we were loading our stuff into our cars and prepared forthe drive home I got a chance to ask my friend whose family ownedthe farm a few questions. The same local people who told hisfamily about the ghost in the attic had told them of a ghost inthe cabin area of the house. He hadn't wanted to tell anyoneabout that ghost the previous evening as he knew that someone wasgoing to sleep in there. Apparently the ghost was that of anindian who had been killed in the area of the cabin a long timeago.
I don't really know whether my conversation with the indian tookplace in reality or in a dream. I don't really care either. Ithink that somehow I made contact with that spirit that night andheard his story.